Greek and use of the Latin alphabet

Factual Questions
1

So, I was doing some work related browsing today, and stumbled across this site:

It’s not a lot of use to me (In fact it’s all Greek to me :smiley: ) but I was struck by the way that non-Greek names - and certain phrases such as “contemporary jazz” are written using the Latin alphabet… e.g., and I’m not sure how this will work on here:

This strikes me as weird. In English, if we mention, say, Demis Roussos, we transliterate the name into our own alphabet, obviously. So why do they write “Ana Sofia Varela” and not “Aνα Σοφια Bαρειλα”? (Probably not a great transliteration, but you get the idea.)

I don’t know about you, but I would find it pretty annoying to have to keep switching between two completely different alphabets when reading a story! Or are all Greek-speakers so familiar with the Latin alphabet that it’s not a problem? And if that is the case - another question: is the Greek alphabet in danger of dying out?

Hope the Greek characters come out OK…

2

In India and Japan, readers are also accustomed to switching among various alphabets. It’s not unusual to see text using, say Devanagari and Latin characters.

3

There was a running joke back in my late teens between my Russian tutor Natalya Fyodorovna and me that War and Peace was one of the greatest novels ever written in the French language! The reason this was funny was that Tolstoy wrote the narrative in Russian, but his characters, being predominantly upper-class Russians, conversed in French, in the Latin alphabet. A typical page might have five lines of narrative text in Russian printed in Cyrillic and thirty or forty of dialogue in French printed in a Latin font.

4

OK, so why does this happen?

In English, if we were quoting some Greek, Russian, Indian or Japanese words in a novel or newspaper, we would always transliterate them to our alphabet. So why are Greeks, Russians, Indian, Japanese etc happy to print them in a foreign alphabet?

5

The Greeks (at least in the cities) are accustomed to dealing with two separate alphabets. When I was there, I saw plenty of signs in Roman letters. I do recall seeing a few “Greekified” names in print, so I’m pretty sure it doesn’t happen all the time. It does make sense, though, to keep names in Roman letters when there is no true Greek equivalent for a particular sound. For example, as far as I know (I studied Classical Greek, not modern) there is no letter in Greek that represents the “sh” sound used in English. So the easiest was to spell out “Bush” would be to keep it in Roman letters.

BTW, how are you inserting the Greek characters into your post?

6

Nitpick: You mean “in the Latin alphabet.” If you were emphasising the design of the letters, then it would be “a Latin typeface.” A “font” is the complete range of characters, figures, and symbols available in a typeface.

This is a Latin font:

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVWXYZabcdefghiklmnopqrstvwxyz0123456789.,;:?!()

It would be unusual to see a book with descriptions or dialogue that comprised such strings of characters

7

I just copied and pasted from the website. I think you can use codes such as &ampersand;sigma; and &ampersand;Sigma; … let’s try that: σ Σ

Ah well, that doesn’t work for me. But it might for you…

8

QUOTE=r_k]

This strikes me as weird. In English, if we mention, say, Demis Roussos, we transliterate the name into our own alphabet, obviously. So why do they write “Ana Sofia Varela” and not “Aνα Σοφια Bαρειλα”? (Probably not a great transliteration, but you get the idea.)
[/QUOTE]

The average Greek journalist will have to choose. Write “Ana Sofia Varela” (it takes a second at worst) or make the following desicions: Write " 'Ανα" or " 'Αννα" as in the greek form of the name? The portugese pronaunce the “Sofia” sofIa (then it written Σοφία, as the greek name witch means wisdom) sOfia (Σόφια as the capital of Bulgaria) or sofiA (Σοφιά as in Agia Sofia the church)? The same problem in “Varela” plus that you must search and find about the proper pronunciation of the “e”. It takes more time and needs more work. The end result is something that, to the average reader looks weird, it doesn’t follow the rulles of greek language, (in this sentence the name sould be in the accusative, and if I see greek letters instictively I’m waiting greek grammar), and by virtue of common practice seems wrong.

If the person is well known then propably we have aggree in a way to write him so in a newspaper you will see Τζορτζ Μπους for Goerge Bush but if it is not a name and you see an english word traslitarated in greek, propably it is so widely used that is in the road to assimilation. Again it depent on how it was written till now.

In the case of varius abbrevations they stay in the alphabet they were created, exept if the trnslation enables the creation of a greek one. Example: ΗΠΑ from Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες Αμερικής for USA, but nobody is going to write ΟΥΣΑ (the translitaration of USA)

It is not a rule pe se, just common practice in press and every day writing. In literature is expected that the writer will use the greek word or have a very good reason to use a foreing word. In official papers the names of foreingers are writen in latin alphabet to avoid mistakes.

Most greeks are able to recognize the latin alphabet even if they don’t speak a foreing language. The differences are not huge.

I don’t think that this is a sing that the greek alphabet is dying. Since Microsoft continues to sell greek edition of MSOffice I think they are still alive. And Microsoft is known enough to translitarate it. :smiley:

But we cannot agree if we sould write Μίκροσοφτ or the more correct Μαϊκροσόφτ :confused:

9

Ah, yes, but that all depends on whether it is a tragedy or comedy. If the latter, all will be well. If the former… well, we know at least one of them had a fatal flaw…

10

An example of a magazine that translates foreign words into greek would be www.4troxoi.gr (they don’t do it anymore though). For example, a Seat Ibiza would become Σέατ Ιμπίθα. They even got the spanish pronunciation correct :smiley: But in my opinion this was simply silly. If you wanted to google somebody’s name for example, you had to do it by trial-and-error, until you got the correct spelling.

11

An interesting question. So far, the Greeks have been willing to give up their currancy for the Euro, but not their alphabet in the interest of uniformity. :slight_smile:

An important point about alphabets is that they are closely tied to religion. The perfect example is Serbo-Croatian. One language, but written in two different alphabets depending on the religion (Catholic/Latin vs Orthodox/Cyrillic). And Turkey represents a rare case of going against the relgious grain in adopting Latin script. So, the issue of which alphabet to use goes a bit deeper than it might appear at first glance.

Of course there is the whol pride thing, too. Since the Greek alphabet preceeded the Latin one, the Greeks probably feel they have an historical tradtion to uphold. And of course the Greek alphabet long preceeded the introduction of Christianity to that country (unlike many European countries where writing was often introduced along with whatever version of Christianity took hold there).

FYI, check out this site to see how vairous alphabets evolved.

12

What would be interesting to see would be if this happened in Hebrew (or Arabic), and the direction of writing (normally right to left) had to reverse to incorporate the foreign word written in Roman letters, and then reverse again to continue the Hebrew script. Or would they just write the foreign name backwards? That would look pretty strange!

This does not arise in Japanese, BTW, as printed material is usually written either top-to-bottom or left to right, and the foreign word is included either vertically or horizontally as appropriate.

13

My experience, from travels in North Africa, is that they don’t switch to the Roman alphabet. Or very rarely, anyway - I think I saw it used a couple of times for a trade name on a medicine leaflet. I just about know the Arabic alphabet well enough to be able to spot familiar names… eg I saw a Moroccan newspaper with a story about Michael Jackson, and could pick out his name in Arabic script.

Kleia - or should that be Kλεία :smiley: - thanks for the very interesting reply.